Contents
Background
The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) consortium has generated biospecimens and data for a variety of diseases. Access to these is controlled via a Data and Biospecimen Access Committee (DBAC). For more information on H3Africa and the research projects involved see: http://h3africa.org
How the catalogue functions
The H3Africa Catalogue gives researchers the ability to browse the available biospecimens and data from H3Africa studies, along with their descriptions, and allows one to request access to these items. The information contained in the H3Africa catalogue is derived from the H3Africa archive, which is hosted by H3ABioNet, and three H3Africa biorepositories (figure 1).
Figure 1: Sources of catalogue content
H3Africa archive
The H3Africa archive acts as custodian of H3Africa genomic and phenotype data, and prepares the data for submission to public repositories such as the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) or the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA). This is a funder requirement, and an important step in facilitating further research that could benefit study participants.
H3Africa biorepositories
Biospecimens from H3Africa studies are deposited into three H3Africa biorepositories, which are based in Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa:
Metadata from the archive and biorepositories are submitted to the catalogue on a monthly basis. The archive data contains more metadata than the data derived from the biorepositories. As a result, biospecimens contained in one of the biorepositories that are not represented by corresponding data in the EGA will not have all the metadata fields available for searching.
The H3Africa policies for data and biospecimen access and release are described in the H3Africa policy documents.